50 MB
One image
Our Project384 scenario uses a 50 MB high-resolution image to make the scale of the data easy to understand.
Space outreach • interactive learning
Space creates data.
Getting it home is the challenge.
Project384 explores a problem that is easy to overlook: spacecraft can collect enormous amounts of high-resolution data, but the communications link back to Earth is finite. What happens when we can capture more than we can transmit?
The data bottleneck
The camera is only half the mission.
High-resolution cameras and scientific instruments can generate data quickly. Sending that data across hundreds of thousands of kilometres requires a communications link, ground-station access, power, pointing, storage and time. The result is a constant engineering trade-off: what should we capture, what should we keep, and what should we send first?
86,400
Images per day
At one image every second, a camera could theoretically capture 86,400 images in 24 hours.
4.32 TB
Daily image data
At 50 MB each, those images would total 4,320,000 MB — about 4.32 TB of data.
Project384 scenario: Assume an 80 Mbps downlink is available for six hours per day. That provides about 216 GB of theoretical transfer capacity — enough for roughly 4,320 of our 50 MB images, or about 5% of the 86,400 images captured. The scenario intentionally simplifies real mission operations so you can experience the trade-off yourself.
Your mission starts now
You can't send everything.
What will you choose?
Enter the interactive scenario, select the imagery you think should be prioritized, and discover how bandwidth changes the decisions we make in space.
Launch Project384 →